Director and car enthusiast Michael Mann talks to Screen about the long road to bringing Ferrari to the screen and why, in his 80th year, he has no plans to slow down.
Michael Mann’s love affair with Ferrari began in 1967 when he was a student at London Film School and saw a 275 GTB/4 cruise the Brompton Road in Kensington. “It was like a sculpture by [Henry] Moore, painted blue, that had power and moved,” recalls Mann who, 23 years later, bought a black European spec 308 after banking his “first substantial pay cheque” for writing and directing 1981’s Thief.
But loving Ferraris is one thing, making a film about the Italian company’s legendary owner Enzo Ferrari — a former racing driver who founded the Scuderia Ferrari racing team, then the world-famous car brand — is entirely another, as Mann himself admits. Yet that desire dates to the early 1990s when the rights to Brock Yates’ non-fiction book Enzo Ferrari: The Cars, The Races, The Machine were owned by the US arm of Cecchi Gori, the Italian producers of Life Is Beautiful and Il Postino. Mann was set to direct, with Sydney Pollack producing. The pair hired Troy Kennedy Martin (The Italian Job) to write the script, which detailed three tempestuous months in 1957 when Enzo, mourning the death of his son Dino, struggled to save the company from bankruptcy — while his wife Laura discovered he has had another child, Piero, with his mistress Lina.
“What was so fascinating was in one part of [Enzo’s] life everything had a precise logic to it,” says Mann, whose acclaimed filmography includes Heat, Collateral and The Insider. “When there was a car accident, he would do a forensic analysis of what caused [it]. When you see his penmanship on ledgers, everything’s perfect. There was always this aspiration to rationality and perfectionism. [But] in his personal life, completely libidinous. Whereas you or I might say, ‘Should I or shouldn’t I do something?’, Enzo’s attitude was, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’”
But try as he might, Mann could not get Ferrari off the start line, because “no movie involving race cars had ever performed at the box office, starting with Grand Prix [1966, starring James Garner] and Le Mans [1971, starring Steve McQueen]. From my analysis, the reason was because they all lacked story.
“I had no interest in making a movie about race cars or racing, per se,” continues Mann. “It’s [about] this icon with impenetrable, stoic presentation. And all that mystique representing something so sensuous and Italian. It was frustrating to be categorised in a subgenre of films that didn’t perform.” Mann developed the project in the mid-1990s via his then-overall deal at Disney, before later taking over the option on both book and screenplay himself. “I ponied up money in 2003, 2004, 2005 to re-option the book.”
As the years rolled by — Martin died in 2009, Yates in 2016 — Mann switched his attentions to another true-life racing story, Ford v Ferrari (aka Le Mans ’66), which told of the Ford Motor Company’s attempt to build a car to defeat the Scuderia Ferrari at the 1966 Le Mans 24-hour race. “Again, it was an expensive movie. It was very difficult to get that launched,” says Mann, who passed the directing reins to Joseph Kosinski before James Mangold made it in 2019, with Mann an executive producer.
Independent means
By 2015, Mann looked to have finally got Ferrari up and running, with Paramount distributing and Christian Bale as Enzo. “Christian and I were in pre-production at one point — pre-pre-production when he was in Spain shooting the Romanian movie [The Promise]. He came to Modena [home of Ferrari] and was on a very radical weight gain programme to play Enzo and started having some difficulties, so we had to stop.”
Most filmmakers might have thrown in the towel at that stage. Not Mann. Following 2016’s cyber thriller Blackhat, he decided to raise the money for Ferrari independently, marking his first film as director outside the Hollywood studio system. Financing came via foreign pre-sales through STX International, the Italian tax credit, as well as private investors. As such, Ferrari’s credits reveal “a veritable conga line of producers”.
“It’s the best and the worst way to make a film,” notes Mann. “The best is we could control what happened and make the film. Having said that, it was a short schedule. It was a 56-day shoot; I shot it in 58. For a film of this scale, that’s short. Independently financed movies are usually $15m-$35m movies.”
Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver as Enzo — “we’re very similar,” says Mann of the actor, “we’re both committed to do whatever it takes to make a performance or film” — alongside Penelope Cruz as his wife and Shailene Woodley as his mistress, cost much more. Building the replica cars cost almost $6m. “Everybody cut [their fees], starting with Adam and myself. Penelope cut as well, so the picture was made by the will of the people working on the movie.”
The responsibilities of independent financing are “vast”, reflects Mann. “They are more than just legal and financial. There are actual people whose money has gone into the film at different times.” Two, Laura Rister and Marie Savare, provided “generous” bridging loans during pre-production. “You need bridging money to keep going, to set yourself up before you can finally close, which typically happens around the first day of principal photography,” says Mann. “In our case, we didn’t close until about the second week. If catastrophe had struck and we weren’t able to start, there was significant risk to both lenders. So there was an impetus to make sure this thing got made.”
The production filmed in Modena, north Italy, in many of the places Enzo lived and worked. “They let us shoot the actual [family] mausoleum,” says Mann. “The streets are the streets, everything is a stone’s throw from Enzo’s house, which is [now his son] Piero’s. All the country roads were within half an hour of Modena. Everything was shot there except the scenes in the mountains that are in the Gran Sasso. The French grand prix was shot at Imola.”
Inside the car
Ferrari climaxes with a recreation of the 1957 Mille Miglia road race, which proved a pivotal moment in Enzo’s future as well as being the last of its kind, after nine spectators were killed. Mann, who directed a 2008 commercial for the Ferrari California, had cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt (The Killer) shoot most of the film in a “rather stately way”, but “I wanted the racing to be agitated. I raced in a Ferrari Challenge for six, seven years,” he says. “So I didn’t want you to observe elegant images, winding roads and long lenses. I wanted to put you inside what racing feels like.”
Ferrari will be released in the US by Neon on Christmas Day, and in UK cinemas on December 26 before reaching Sky Cinema in 2024.
Mann turned 80 this year, but the Chicago-born filmmaker is showing no signs of slowing down. He recently directed the pilot for Max’s Tokyo Vice and is developing an English-language version of Korean crime thriller Veteran for CJ ENM. But his next directing gig will be Heat 2 for Warner Bros, adapting the book he cowrote with Meg Gardiner that was both prequel and sequel to his 1995 film.
Driver is in talks to play a young Neil McCauley, the character played by Robert De Niro in the original. “That’s the plan right now,” says Mann. “But one never knows.”
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